Her accusation precipitated what is now recognized as a grotesque miscarriage of justice in the Jim Crow South.
Sheriff Willis V. McCall, far left, and an unidentified man stand next to three of the accused “Groveland Four”: Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Charles Greenlee in Lake County, Fla. hours of July 16, 1949, a young White couple — Norma Lee Padgett and her husband, Willie — were driving along a desolate road in central Florida after a night of whiskey drinking and dancing at the local American Legion hall.Okahumpka, on the way to get a bite to eat, when their Ford stalled.
“There are a lot of Black families that have been gaslighted,” King said in an interview. “They know what the truth is. They know these stories are out there, and they never get anywhere. There’s no judicial relief.”In the case of the Groveland Four, King noted, the FBI conducted its own investigation parallel to the sham prosecution in Lake County, and King obtained unredacted FBI files during his research.maelstrom let loose by Ms.
They also took custody of Greenlee, a 16-year-old in possession of an unloaded pistol who was initially charged with vagrancy at a gas station. WhenMcCall led a deputized mob of more than 1,000 men with bloodhounds on a 30-hour hunt for Thomas, 26, who had fled through a cypress swamp in Madison County near the Georgia border. McCall told reporters that Thomas had been “belligerent as the devil” before he was killed in a fusillade of bullets, and the killing was ruled a justifiable homicide.
Newspapers highlighted other inconsistencies. The St. Petersburg Times reported in 1950 that Ms. Padgett claimed to be “crying profusely and visibly shaken” when she first encountered the night watchman.But the watchman told the newspaper that she was “extremely calm” and that even though she claimed to have been held captive, she said the men had “not harmed her.” Moreover, she told him, according to the paper, that “she had not seen her captors clearly enough to be able to identify them.
Three years later, after Irvin was retried and again found guilty, he narrowly escaped execution in the electric chair and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was paroled in 1968 and found dead in his car a year later when he returned to Groveland for a funeral.
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